My internet-based photography business

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In a previous post, I’ve listed what I consider to be the
top ten
proven ways to make money from photography. As those who know me may have
guessed, I did not use any of those avenues during my first ten years
in business. Instead, my photography income is almost entirely based on the sales of prints and licenses
of images created on self-assignment, through this website.

The mode of operation of the business was therefore the following:
I visited on my own locations of personal interest to me, created
photographs there, published them on terragalleria.com, and waited for
visitors to find them.
This way of doing business worked particularly well for me for two reasons.

On the photography side, this kept the fun and inspiration: functioning as an artist, I was
able photograph exactly what I was interested in, in the way I
meant to, free of any interferences associated with commercial jobs or
external pressures at a time when I was developping my vision.
Whether the resulting images would be “saleable” or not was not a consideration,
since I feel that all images would contribute something interesting to the website. While peripheral
activities such as teaching, writing, and providing other services, can be rewarding on their own,
not engaging in them let me devote more time to my photography
projects, which were the reason I chose to have a career in photography.
This also provided a test of whether my images were strong enough for
me to
make a living for me and my family from them alone.

On the business side, I have a modest, low-profile personality,
which would prevent me from being an effective salesperson. In particular, I am not particularly
good at “pushing”, trying to attempt initial contact with specific buyers. This is how
most professional photographers operate (top proven ways to promote your photography)
because the alternative approach can be expensive. In “pull marketing”, instead of contacting clients, you
use mass-media outlets to get clients to respond by contacting you. Traditionally, pull marketing
has relied on print, television, and radio. Because of the cost of advertising in those media, pull marketing was
used mainly by large companies. That’s where the internet has been a
game changer. I was more a mathematician interested in the
perception of space than a software developer, but my
technical background (CS PhD) still made it possible to
create a large photography website using a text editor ten
years ago
when there were no
easy-to-use tools or services for doing so. Although I am not good at coding,
I am even worse at cold-calling, having worked in a field where you
are judged by your results (science and engineering are areas that use proofs).

The internet has transformed how we access and consume information.
Potentially anyone with a computer and a connection from
around the world can see your images around the clock, opening up for the first time a line of direct communication
between artists and art buyers. People do not visit your website because you handed them a business card, but because
they somehow found it on the internet. Yet, this seemingly random mechanism can sometimes provide a number of viewers
comparable with traditional media, at an extremely low cost.
This makes the internet the first affordable medium for pull marketing.
Maintaining and updating terragalleria.com represents a
considerable amount of work, however the hosting fees for the dedicated server are less than $250/month.

It’s not just marketing. Unlike in the physical world, it is also
inexpensive to own and operate your
sales outlet. A gallery would split the sales proceeds, but more
importantly, it would carry only a small selection of your
artworks. While a gallery does promote its artists, that promotion is
split amongst represented artists – not evenly, and not in your favor
if you are not a “star”. But the bulk of the promotion effort goes
towards the gallery itself. This is even more true of stock photography
agencies, with the difference that while good galleries are true
partners for their artists,
rare nowadays is the agency which has your best interest in
mind when making their deals, while many are borderline exploitative. On the other hand, your own website accepts every work you submit:
it gives you total control on which work is presented and how it is presented, and no one else
is represented there. This was key for letting me publish the images I
created by visiting my own locations of personal interest and
maximizing revenues from sales. When you sell a product through a
third party, most often you need to provide them with an inventory of
finished products, such as prints, or fully corrected and keyworded
digital files. They can be produced on-demand if you do the
fulfillment yourself, saving time and resources.

The bad news with doing business on the internet is that it takes a lot
of viewers to make a photography sale. Most people who came to your
site just stumbled on it. Therefore, unlike those who go to a shopping
site such as amazon.com, they did not come there to buy something. Nor can they be
talked into buying something by pushy webpages and a hard sell: those
just turn potential clients away. Selling photography on the Internet
is a bit like hunting birds by shooting randomly in the sky. In my
experience, it requires a considerable amount of traffic, since the
ratio of buyer to visitor is only a tiny fraction of a percent. To
give some numbers, in the year 2009, terragalleria.com received 5.7 M
visits. This was measured using the great Google Analytics, which offers (since 2008)
the most accurate site statistics because it automatically disregards
numerous visits by the search engine crawlers, unlike for example
Webalizer. That year, we sold 267 prints and 148 licenses, which actually generated more revenue than prints.
So it took 21,000
visits to sell a print and 38,000 visits to sell a license. True, if we had priced our licenses and prints at
a lower point (prints currently start at $350 for the smallest sizes), we would
have sold more, but that would have meant more work. We were pleased enough with the balance of
revenue and work at our price point, which catered to high-end buyers,
but this choice has to be different for each photographer.

In retail marketing, location is everything. On the internet, the equivalent of location is
traffic. The good news is that it is possible for an individual photographer website
to get high traffic numbers before attracting traditional media attention. Although my images have
been widely published – thanks to photo editors finding images on terragalleria.com –
my name hadn’t been noticed by a wide audience before the airing of
The
National Parks: America’s Best Idea which occurred in late Sept 2009. However, by 2004 terragalleria.com
had already more than 2 million annual visits (difference between
statistics packages factored). The year 2011 is
not finished, but the number of visits was 6.4 M YTD, which is 640,000
monthly, or about 21,000 daily. This possibly makes terragalleria.com the most visited
of individual photography website this year, although numbers can
fluctuate dramatically in way that I cannot predict or understand, as seen in
the following graph from Alexa. Unlike Google Analytics,
Alexa let you estimate traffic metrics for all websites, not just
yours. If the traffic for a target website is above a certain threshold, I have found the statistically-derived
metrics to be quite meaningful. Although Alexa provides
several statistics, the most significant in comparing different websites is “Reach”. I’ve added
for comparison statistics from two other sites. Trey Ratcliff (Stuck
In Customs) is
the most popular photography blogger and most followed photographer on
Google+ at the time of writing, and has a sizeable team working for
him. Fotopedia (the publisher of my National Parks App) is the first collaborative photo
encyclopedia with more than 750,000 photos, curated by a community of thousands of
members, and supported by a VC-backed company with more than a dozen employees.

In the next post in this series about our 10th year in business, I’ll
go into some details about how terragalleria.com got that amount of traffic.

Thanks for a very nice write up! I look forward to more in this series. Personally I think that the golden age of photography as a creative process is here but the golden age of photography as a business is still to come. Your achievements in a such a tough environment are remarkable. .. keep it going!

Great post, thank you for sharing. This is kind of a modern day “secrets” of success. It’s a recipe to follow in the quickly changing times we live in. Thanks very much. Absolutely loving your work right now, holy cow!

Very generous of you to publish this information. I’m curious what your monthly bandwidth usage is on terragaleria as I’m considering a setting up a home based server. whilst I don’t expect the volumes of traffic you are receiving it might be useful to interpolate the bandwidth from a larger site. I’m guessing around between 70 and 100 GB a month.

most of the search engine bots(including most of the ones who don’t identify themselves properly) don’t download images so pageviews by them is for the markup files only and possibly not even css etc. However, the image bots such as google and slurp do and I think they will be using large amounts of bandwidth.

As I’m sure you are well aware by now, webstats are never truly accurate. It’s the nature of the beast. Even Google Analytics is suspect. They weren’t even reporting visits via google images a while back when they changed their domain name structure and the format of what they added to the referer. I don’t know if they fixed that yet and they didn’t respond when I pointed it out to them.

QT Luong is a full-time photographer and author with a broad range of work on natural and cultural landscapes, noted for being the first to photograph each of the 60 US National Parks - in large format, the subject of Treasured Lands, winner of six national book awards.